Month: August 2016

We proudly announce the release of RQGIS! RQGIS establishes an interface between R and QGIS, i.e. it allows the user to access the more than 1000 QGIS geoalgorithms from within R. To install it, run:

install.packages("RQGIS")

Naturally, you need to install other software (such as QGIS) to run RQGIS properly. Therefore, we wrote a package vignette, which guides you through the installation process of QGIS, GRASS and SAGA on various platforms. To access it, run:

vignette("install_guide", package = "RQGIS")

How to use RQGIS

To introduce RQGIS, we will demonstrate how to calculate the SAGA topographic wetness index. The first step is the creation of a QGIS environment. This is a list containing the paths RQGIS needs to access QGIS. Luckily for us, set_env does this for us. We merely need to specify the root path to the QGIS installation. This is most likely something like C:/OSGeo4W~1 on Windows, /usr on Linux and /usr/local/Cellar on a Mac. If we do not specify a path to the QGIS root folder, set_env tries to figure it out. This, however, might be time-consuming depending on the size of the drives to search.

library("RQGIS")
env <- set_env()

Secondly, we need to find out the name of the function in QGIS which calculates the wetness index:

There are three algorithms containing the words wetness and index in their short description. Here, we choose saga:sagawetnessindex. To retrieve the corresponding function arguments, we use get_args_man. By setting option to TRUE, we indicate that we would like to use the default values, if available:

Of course, we need to specify certain function arguments such as the input (DEM) and output (TWI) arguments. Please note that RQGIS accepts as input argument either the path to a spatial object or a spatial object residing in R. Here, we will use a digital elevation model, which comes with the RQGIS package: